Intel Shows Off Quake Wars, Ray Traced

An anonymous reader writes "At the Research@Intel Day 2008, Intel showed a ray-traced version of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Compared to the original game, a water with reflections and refractions and a physically correct glass shader were added. Also, a camera portal with up to 200 recursions to itself has been demonstrated. To show off this ongoing research in the topic of real-time ray tracing, a four-socket system with quad cores has been used that allowed rendering the enhanced visual effects in 1280x720 at 14-29 fps. Just two years before, early versions of Quake 4: Ray Traced ran only at 256x256 with 17 fps. Even though Intel's upcoming Larrabee will be primarily a rasterizer, the capabilities for also doing ray tracing on it should deliver interesting opportunities."

Comments

Re:No Caps?

[ILuvRamen]

Maybe they didn't have a spare core to process that hehehe. Seriously, this technology is useless. There's just recently been a graphics card that can anti-alias 8x in Oblivion at full resolution and keep 60 FPS. Why don't they work on real features instead of something that's just going to become another DirectX 10 in that nobody cares about it cuz it's a pointless, horrible upgrade to make (Vista and a new, probably expensive card, no thanks!)

Re:Why do i feel that ...

[grumbel]

Noone would want ray-trace-quality graphics in their games? Realtime raytracing as demonstrated here is good for shiny spheres and little else. I don't know about you, but I have rather little use for shiny spheres in my games and if I do a little fake environment map does the job quite well.

How realistic a rendering looks simply has nothing to do if you rasterize or raytrace, its just a different approach to get pixels on the screen. Global illumination and all that stuff is what matters when you want a really realistic look, but you don't get that for free with either rasterization or raytracing. And when it comes to graphical progress in the last years, a lot of stuff is happening on the framebuffer itself, and is as such completly independed of the way your geometry rendering works.

Anyway, I'd be impressed when they manage to render something that looks *better* then current games, not when they manage to render old games with a crappier look, less fps and a few shiny spheres added.

Raytracing simply isn't a magic bullet.